As a business owner or entrepreneur, you are likely pulled in a million different directions, so making it easier to select a high-quality learning management system (LMS) that works for you gives you the freedom to focus on what matters most – your business and your customers.
At Thinkific, we believe that choosing the right learning platform is more about your business than ours, and we don’t know much about you (yet)! So before diving too deep into features we highly recommend booking a call with our solutions team to help us align on the best way to achieve your goals.
With that said, to make life simpler, we’ve built this guide to better highlight the differences between two popular platforms – Thinkific and TalentLMS.
But first, let’s do a quick refresher on these two platforms.
Thinkific
Thinkific enables entrepreneurs, speakers, authors, trainers, and companies to create, market, sell and deliver their own online courses. Our mission at Thinkific is no less than to revolutionize the way people learn and earn online by giving them the tools they need to turn their expertise into a sustainable business that impacts both them and their audience.
As you scale, Thinkific scales with you. Our Thinkific Plus plan gives high-growth, high-volume organizations the flexibility and reliability needed to provide online education the way they want it. Thinkific Plus supports mid-sized companies focused on revenue generation, customer education, partner education, or employee education at scale with a cost-effective alternative to bigger, clunkier, traditional LMS platforms. You can learn more about Thinkific Plus here.
TalentLMS
TalentLMS markets itself as a super-easy, cloud LMS to train employees, partners and customers. It was designed for people that are looking to get their training online quickly without a lot of customization to support the needs of their audience. The platform comes with pre-made courses covering customer service, sales, and policy and compliance.
On their homepage, you’ll see this messaging: “The fastest path to better training.”
Thinkific vs TalentLMS and other online course platforms
G2 Grid® for Online Learning Platforms
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Thinkific vs. Teachable: Detailed Comparison
Student Experience
We understand that your students, customers, or employees’ success are vital to your success as a business. That is why Thinkific has been designed specifically with student experience as a core attribute. Our course player, themes, customization options, and student dashboard reflect this. TalentLMS’s platform is built for people that are looking to rapidly deploy training content rather than creating an engaging student experience. Customer reports suggest that TalentLMS’s student interface is outdated and can be difficult to navigate. In contrast, Thinkific goes above and beyond to create a seamless branded student experience.
“This company [Thinkific] cares about its customers and user experience. I find the platform to be very user-friendly and well thought out. They incorporate lots of features to improve the student experience, which I appreciate. There are tons of articles and videos sent to you regularly to help you improve your course and business. Their customer service is also fantastic.” Online Reviewer
eCommerce Capabilities
Thinkific was built for the entrepreneur looking to sell courses online. We ensure that if you’re selling courses as your primary business model, or wanting to do so down the road to compliment your other education programs, that we have an easy to use system with a setup checkout, day of accessible funds and eCommerce integrations. In contrast, TalentLMS is built for training purposes and lacks eCommerce functionality. This is a choice by their platform to focus on internal training and is reflected in their positioning and reviews.
“We offer some integrations with payment gateways and specific eCommerce features allowing our customers to sell their courses through their TalentLMS portal but it is not our main focus…Using these editors you have more options, but CSS and Javascript knowledge is required. We cannot provide customization services to our customers, according to our policy, but our software support engineers are always available to advise and guide you through.” – TalentLMS CTO’s response to an Online Reviewer
Customization
Entrepreneurs and businesses that are looking to create a scalable online course platform require a higher level of customization to create a unique and seamless student experience. Thinkific supports this need with tons of easy to use features including white-labeling, custom domains, branding options, API access, SSO, and integrations with industry-leading software services. While TalentLMS are quick to say they are ‘easy to customize’, the ease of use stops after email edits, changing fonts and colors, and custom badges. For more “advanced” customizations, CSS or Javascript knowledge is required.
“User and admin interface are easy to use and very intuitive. I feel like it’s much better than others in terms of UI. It is also very easy to design your curriculum and draft your courses. You can make a sales page with a countdown timer in minutes, which is great to use for quick launches.” – Online Reviewer
Customer Support
Thinkific is consistently applauded for our outstanding customer support. This is because customer support has been institutionalized at Thinkific – every single employee takes regular turns doing support shifts. TalentLMS is also positively reviewed for its customer support and quick response time once customers are onboarded. Due to having a smaller team, their sales support has been reviewed as slow to react.
“My experience so far with Thinkific has been remarkable. The help and support plus the service and features they offer worldwide is amazing beyond one’s imagination. I love how their mentors and agents follow up with helping people globally trying to have an online presence. I strongly recommend Thinkific to everyone who wants to develop an online course, book, training tutorial or anything that’s relevant to the learning of a better and brighter helpful future for others.” – Online Reviewer
Summary: Thinkific vs TalentLMS
TalentLMS was built for the busy trainer that is looking to deploy content quickly to their internal team or customers. While their platform is simple to use from an administrator’s side, it is lacking in terms of student experience and customization capabilities. In contrast, Thinkific was built with your students’ success as our top priority. We will support you and your business every step of the way with advanced features, integrations, customizations, and the customer support you need to scale.
TalentLMS vs Thinkific Comparison Table
| Thinkific | TalentLMS | |
| Pricing (Monthly) | $99 | $129 |
| Users | Unlimited | 100 |
| Single Sign On | Yes | Yes |
| SSL | Yes | No |
| Customer Support | ||
| Phone | Yes | Yes |
| Yes | Yes | |
| Student Experience | ||
| Send Personalized automated emails to your students | Yes | Yes |
| Student progress reporting | Yes | Yes |
| Assignments, Quizzes, Surveys, Exams | Yes | Yes |
| Built in Student Discussion | Yes | Yes |
| Course reviews (social proof) | Yes | No |
| Multiple Instructors | Yes | Yes |
| Storyline, Captivate and more | Yes | Yes |
| Voice over presentations | Yes | No |
| Completion certificates | Yes | Yes |
| Marketing & Sales | ||
| Free, Paid and Subscription | Yes | Yes |
| Stripe, PayPal | Yes | Yes |
| Coupons & Promotions | Yes | Yes |
| Upsells & Bundles | Yes | Yes |
| Groups | Yes | Yes |
| Integrations (AWeber, MailChimp, InfusionSoft, etc) | Yes | Yes |
| Advanced Marketing Integrations (ie: Mixpanel, Intercom, Segment.io etc.) | Yes | No |
| Affiliate program | Yes | No |
| White Labeling | Yes | Yes |
| Features | ||
| Drip Content | Yes | Yes |
| Time-Limited Courses | Yes | Yes |
| Prerequisite lessons and courses | Yes | Yes |
| Bulk import course content | Yes | Yes |
| Bulk Student Import / Enrollment | Yes | Yes |
| Site Builder – Drag and Drop Page designer | Yes | No |
| Themes and Color pickers | Yes | Yes |
| Easily add externally hosted content & apps | Yes | Yes |
| Custom Domains | Yes | Yes |
| Private / hidden courses | Yes | |
| MailChimp Integration | Yes | No |
| Webhooks | Yes | No |
| Landing Page, Sales Page Custom HTML/CSS | Yes | Yes |
| Multiple Course/Site Admins | Yes | Yes |
| SSL Certificate | Yes | Yes |
| Scorm and Tin Can | No | Yes |
| API | Yes | Yes |
See what our customers say
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We hope you’ve found this comparison of Thinkific vs TalentLMS useful. Features and support are constantly changing! This analysis was accurate to the best of our knowledge as of August 2021
